GitHub issues are one of the most popular bug tracker in the world.

It provides the owners of a repository the ability to organize, tag and assign to milestones issues.

If you open an issue on a project managed by someone else, it will stay open until either you close it (for example if you figure out the problem you had) or if the repo owner closes it.

Sometimes you’ll get a definitive answer, other times the issue will be left open and tagged with some information that categorizes it, and the developer could get back to it to fix a problem or improve the codebase with your feedback.

Most developers are not paid to support their code released on GitHub, so you can’t expect prompt replies, but other times Open Source repositories are published by companies that either provide services around that code, or have commercial offerings for versions with more features, or a plugin-based architecture, in which case they might be working on the open source software as paid developers.

Lessons in this unit: